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Criticism 43.3 (2002) 312-314



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Led by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe by Rachel Tzvia Back. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Pp. x + 238. $59.95 cloth.

It has occurred to me more than once during my own fifteen years of fascination with the poetry of Susan Howe that she may well be the most interesting and important poet of our time, albeit one of the most difficult and least appreciated. A full length scholarly treatment of Howe's poetics is long overdue, and Rachel Tzvia Back's loving and rigorous assessment, Led by Language, offers readers a clear introduction to and overview of Howe's poetry, as well as thorough in-depth readings of some of Howe's major poetic works to date.

Back distinguishes Howe from the language poets, with whom she does have much in common, and describes her instead as "an avant-garde writer located firmly within an age-old tradition of lyrical poetry, even as she subverts many of the premises of that tradition" (15). Howe's interest in language, its musicality and its mysteries, Back takes as a model for her own methodology in reading Howe: "I follow her words," she explains (4). This is no easy feat, given the difficulty and opacity of Howe's poetry, and Back begins her introduction by addressing this very issue.

Howe's poetry has been dismissed as elitist, so inaccessible and unreadable that only the most highly educated and eccentric audience would find merit in it. These charges have always troubled me, at odds as they are with what I have seen as central to Howe's project: an anti-elitist democratizing tendency to admit and preserve even the most marginalized would-be excluded elements in her poems—be those elements textual or historical. Back offers a helpful account of Howe's "difficulty" by pointing out that it is not the poet's intention to be "arch" or "coy," but rather the work's opacity is "intrinsic to her writing process as well as being an outcome of the thematic and formal foci of her poetry" (4-5). In other words, the work's very difficulty is precisely what might offer willing readers access to the work in the first place. Back insists that Howe's "poetry is propelled by an inner logic" to which an attentive reader can become attuned by listening, looking, and engaging with the text (5).

In addition to the difficulty of Howe's work, Back identifies two other motifs central to her project—motifs that inform the closer readings of individual works comprising most of Back's study. These are the role of place in Howe's work and her interest in history; the two are closely related in that there is a personal, autobiographical element in both. The places that figure in Howe's poetry are those that are central to her own life and family heritage: New England and Ireland, in particular. At the same time, Back finds that "the abundance of displacements, disappearances, and long absences" in Howe's work [End Page 312] define her relationship to place as that of foreigner or exile (8). Howe's historical/poetic project, then, is to mark the absences and exclusions in history in which she also, perhaps ironically, finds herself. Back's introduction thus offers a satisfying account of the complexity of Howe's poetics by tracing the connections among her major concerns.

In chapter two Back offers readings of three of Howe's works that engage specifically American themes and histories: Secret History of the Dividing Line, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, and Thorow. Back suggests that to identify what is particularly American about these works we must look deeper than mere thematic or formal concerns; we must look to the most defining moments of U.S. history. For instance, Howe engages the interaction between self and other that is central to questions of identity in the United States, as well as the "Puritan voice and approach to life" and "faith system...

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